Avoiding the cone of fire and other things we shouldn't have to do
Preparing for unrest in an election year.
Everything seems fine when you’re walking around on a quiet college campus on a sunny morning but even then, a little voice in the back of my head goes, “Where is the security?” and “Why are all these doors open if there’s not a lot of classes right now?” That’s how you know that your mind has been changed forever.
I walked into one of the buildings on the Georgia Southern campus yesterday morning and into a conference room where a handful of people had gathered for an all-day seminar on How to Survive Being a Journalist in 2024. It was all the typical stuff — here’s how to stay unharmed during a riot, here’s the kinds of “less than lethal” weapons police are using (legally, I think they have to say “less than” now because of all the people those formerly “non-lethal” weapons have killed). We learned about police riot formations and active shooter response and all the other stuff you have to be ready for at any minute in a country that some people really do believe is not completely falling apart. I have been through many of the scenarios laid out yesterday by the fine people with the International Women’s Media Foundation (IWMF) but it was still good to be reminded of all those little things you forget when you’ve gone a few years without finding yourself in the middle of a riot or a potential mass casualty event. Things like how you need to back into a parking spot both so you can get out quickly and so it’s harder to see your license plate in case anyone is following you back to your car. Things like how, “under no circumstances are police allowed to delete pictures or other content from your devices” because that is essentially deleting the truth. Things like avoiding the cone of fire during a mass shooting so you don’t get shot or die.
The whole point of the event was to prepare journalists for widespread civil unrest and political violence that, apparently, many people other than me are beginning to anticipate will occur in the coming year. Frankly, every journalist, whether they have experience in conflict zones or not, should undergo this training because it could save their lives. I should have had this training before I ever stepped foot onto a crime scene back in Peoria, let alone navigated a riot in any of the places where I’ve done that over the years. While the purpose of the training was safety, the message I took from yesterday was that we have a wholesale problem with authoritarianism in this country. It is not as simple as Trump is a Bad Guy. The female journalists at the training talked about being threatened because they reported on undocumented immigrants working at a major industrial development near Savannah — “you’re messing with a lot of money” — to being harassed and cyber stalked by people who didn’t like their reporting, to cops covering up their ID numbers and name badges. “If they’re taking steps to avoid identification we can assume they’re acting beyond their authority,” a woman hosting the training pointed out.
IWMF staff also pointed out that not only was there “increased sensitivity” at polling locations where people who believe in election lies have harassed journalists but that in 2020 organizations like the IWMF and others saw an “increase in law enforcement ignoring press credentials and detaining journalists in conflict scenarios.” I saw that firsthand in Minneapolis, where police fired on marked and credentialed journalists screaming “press” as the less than lethal rounds flew in their direction. Then I was reminded that a CNN reporter was arrested on live television which is something I had completely forgotten about. A Canadian military veteran who served three tours in Afghanistan and now works with the IWMF said that he also watched what happened in 2020 “in person, and I think it’s going to get amped up even more,” this year.
I’ve begun to wonder recently whether all this is really that bad or if I’m just deep in it because of my job, a question I grappled with for my forthcoming book — which covers similar periods of unrest from 2014 through 2022 — and I think the answer is that it is all very bad, but most people don’t pay as much attention to the madness as I do. Still, I think we’ll look back on this time 50 or 100 years from now and say, this is when it all started to really fall apart. Authoritarianism has always been around, which is why George Orwell wrote that if “you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face — forever,” but I just thought that it couldn’t really happen here because the fundamental mindset of Americans is “don’t tell me what to do” and authoritarianism is all about people telling you what to do. But something seems to have changed in the last decade. It’s not that Americans have decided they want someone — Trump, police, the military, the media — telling them what to do, it’s that many Americans have decided that they can be the ones doing the telling. In ways large and small, Americans have decided that they can implement their own version of authoritarianism on their fellow countrymen. The initial promise of the internet was that it would democratize the world and make it so ideas could flow freely from one person or country to the next. But then capitalism got involved, and there was too much money to be made by an algorithm that could tell companies every little thing about all of us so they could sell us the frighteningly specific things we’re all into. The algorithm worked for politics, too, and now, instead of being exposed to ideas that might give us a different perspective on the world — education and knowledge being the historical path toward liberalism — we’re continually siloed further into our own holes. Because authoritarianism is based on fear and not hope, ignorance and not understanding , the radicalization of many Americans toward the right has been incredibly successful. How far they will choose to take it in the real world — or how much farther, really — remains to be seen.
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P.S. I’ve had a lot of good responses to the first run of American Doom over the last two weeks and I’m very grateful for that. I’ve made this post free for everyone but later this week I’ll have a paywalled piece that details the ways in which people in Georgia have lied to authorities about their role in attempts to overturn the 2020 election. That’s information you won’t get anywhere else, and it’s part of a broader pattern of Republicans lying about their role in an insurrection that didn’t just take place at the Capitol on January 6, but across the country in attempts to overturn the election. In a very real way, that insurrection continues to this day as the majority of the party prepares to deny the results of 2024. If you appreciate this work, please consider signing up for a paid subscription. The most it will cost you is $60, and that’s to become a founding member. For that, I’ll look into or write about something that’s driving you nuts, needs investigated, or simply needs some attention. Keep your head up.